Letters

Family breakdown

Peter Gilet

Contents - Dec 2010 - Buy a copy now Homily: Christmas - Pope Benedict XVI Euthanasia: Australia's Christian churches unite in opposition - MIchael Gilchrist News: The Church Around the World Youth: Another successful Australian Catholic youth initiative - Br Barry Coldrey Call to Holiness: Facing life issues in love and truth - Babette Francis Congress for Life: Catholic orthodoxy: key to promoting the culture of life - Cardinal Raymond Burke Homily: Christus Rex Pilgrimage: Building God's Kingdom on earth - Bishop Peter J. Elliott Catholic origins: Psychology and Christianity: need they be at odds? - Wanda Skowronska Poetry: Euthanasia, the insidious escalator - Bruce Dawe Letters: Eucharistic faith - Anna M. Silvas Letters: Marriage - Arnold Jago Letters: Lay saint? - Eamonn Keane Letters: Euthanasia - Brian Coman Letters: Ecumenism - Kevin McManus Letters: Family breakdown - Peter Gilet Books: EDMUND CAMPION, by Richard Simpson, revised by Peter Joseph - Fr Anthony Robbie (reviewer) Books: THE LAST CRUSADER, by Louis de Wohl - Michael Daniel (reviewer) Books: FIVE SMOOTH STONES: A 40 Day WYD08 Journal, by Stephen Lawrence - Bishop Joseph Grech (reviewer) Fighting Fund: 2010 Fighting Fund progress Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: Messiah: the one anointed by God to reconcile sinners - Fr Dennis W. Byrnes

I think that we are at last seeing the full effects of the breakdown of the Australian family. After 21 years away from teaching, I returned to casual, relief teaching last year in WA.

Students are no longer just disruptive. Some are incapable of any communication at all and begin shouting and hooning around before the teacher has finished his or her first sentence. They are, above all, aggressive. Unbelievably so. Partly, perhaps, because they are angry and fatherless, the products of that serial polygamy masquerading as the Australian family.

This is partly so because teachers are absolutely powerless. The cane went, then detention, then the time-out room. That the authorities have flooded teaching with overseas teachers, putting some 700 WA teachers out of the classroom, does not help. Yet teachers are not admitting to this state of affairs; or are not allowed to by those over them.

The only way out would be more monetary incentives for private schools, for family businesses and farms, and creating more jobs for the men at the lower end of the economy, who are the natural heads of the traditional family and who have been neutered by their poverty. Affirming the traditional family in law would help too.

PETER GILET
Belmont, WA

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 23 No 11 (December 2010 - January 2011), p. 14